A blog mostly about technical difficulties and how they were overcome

Main menu

Post navigation

Dropbox made a poor choice with their newest Android version

I switched from Verizon to Straightalk on AT&T and reset my phone in the process. I reinstalled my apps and everything worked fine except Dropbox. Specifically, the automatic camera upload feature did not work.

So, I look into this in the settings and only find the option to connect to a personal Dropbox. I have a business / team account with my company. I try to connect this to my Dropbox account and I am told I cannot connect it to the same account. Crap. I find this relevant article -> https://www.dropbox.com/help/307/en . The summary is that Business users now need to create their own personal accounts or manually upload the photos. I contact Dropbox support for a workaround and get the same information.

Here is where it breaks down for me. I don’t need or want a personal account that makes file management more difficult and obfuscates my data further. Do I need another email and password and login to access the information I could previously access in one location? No. I understand the use case here and I think only having camera upload on by default for personal accounts is wise for the majority. Allowing a connection from business to personal accounts is also wise for those who want this capability. However, completely disallowing a business user from using a previously available feature with their higher cost plan is a problem. There are business users who have legitimate business needs for their cameras with their business Dropbox accounts. Why completely prevent those users from selecting this option?

Generally, Dropbox is fantastic and it has made a huge improvement at work, at home and for my data management in general. File revisions are a life saver as well as being able to easily sync between a mix of devices. This is one of the few times Dropbox has made a design choice that is a genuine disappointment. I hope they will hear from more business users to understand that this feature should not be specifically and wholly excluded from the business accounts.

Update: I found a short term resolution. The version I had installed with this frustrating limitation was v2.4.2 of the Dropbox Android App. I looked for older versions and found them here: http://dropbox.en.uptodown.com/android/old . I tried v2.4.1 which had the same issue. I then went back to v2.3.12.10 and was able to restore full function! I turned off auto-update on this version and will be keeping this version until Dropbox resolves this problem.